Session Prep in 30 Minutes, From the Player’s Chair

I cannot tell you how to prep a session. I have never run one.

What I can tell you is what session prep in 30 minutes looks like from the other side of the screen. After about 35 years in the player’s chair you can spot it within ten minutes of a game starting. You know when the GM has done the work and you know when they have not, and it is almost never about how clever the adventure is.

So this is a prep routine worked backwards. Not what GMs say they do, but what must have happened before the sessions that actually worked, broken into six five-minute pieces.

Minutes 0 to 5: write down what happened last time

Three or four sentences, written, not remembered. Where we were, what we found out, who was hurt, what we said we would do next.

From the player’s seat the difference is stark. A written recap takes a minute and everyone is in the room. An unwritten one turns into five people reconstructing a fortnight-old evening out loud, disagreeing, and gradually losing the thread of why any of it mattered.

It is the cheapest five minutes on this list and the one I notice most.

Minutes 5 to 10: give everyone one thing

Go down the list of players and write one line each. A name from their background turning up somewhere. A person who recognises them. A choice only their character would be asked to make.

You do not need to build scenes around these. Most of the time a single sentence dropped into a conversation does it. The player sits up, and so does everyone else, because something just became specific.

I have played whole arcs as furniture. Nobody is unkind about it and nobody mentions it, but you stop reaching for things, and a quiet player who is given nothing simply gets quieter.

Minutes 10 to 15: three beats, not a plot

The sessions that moved well seem to have had about three things the GM wanted to happen, in rough order, with no particular attachment to how we got there.

A place we would probably end up. A person we would probably meet. A thing that would probably go wrong. Written as single lines.

That is enough shape to stop an evening drifting, and loose enough that when we did something unexpected, which we always did, nothing broke.

Minutes 15 to 20: names, and the one rule

Two jobs, and both are dull, which is probably why they get skipped.

Write a column of names you can hand out on demand. Twenty of them lasts a very long time, and you never have to do it again.

Then work out the one or two rules tonight is likely to need, based on what we said we were going to do, and note the page. Not the whole book. The chase, or the grapple, or the thing one of us does every single week.

Minutes 20 to 25: everything you need on one page

Whatever we are likely to fight, talk to or run away from, copy the numbers onto a single sheet in front of you.

A fight where the GM has the numbers to hand moves. A fight where they are flipping through a book stops being tense somewhere around round three, and by round four two of us are talking about something else entirely.

Nobody has ever been annoyed at a GM for looking something up. We get annoyed at the silence while it happens.

Minutes 25 to 30: one object and one ending

Make one thing we can hold. A letter, a torn map, a list of names. It takes five minutes and it is the bit of the evening people describe afterwards.

Then decide roughly where you would like to stop. A door opening, an arrival, something said out loud that changes what we thought was going on.

Sessions that end on something are the ones we talk about in the group chat during the week. Sessions that end because it is late are the ones where the recap is hard to write.

How you can tell it did not happen

None of this is a secret from the players. We can read it in the first half hour.

The pause before a name. The recap that becomes a disagreement. The session where one person says almost nothing. The fight that turns into admin. The evening that stops in a corridor.

I am not saying any of that ruins a game. Some of my favourite evenings were held together with nothing much at all, by a GM who was quick on their feet and had friends who wanted to be there. But those evenings were harder work for them than they needed to be.

Why thirty minutes, and not three hours

Here is the part I only understand from this side of the screen. More preparation is not automatically better.

I have sat at tables where the GM had clearly spent an entire weekend on it, and you could feel it. There was a route through the evening and we were on it. Every door we tried that was not the intended door quietly did not work. It is a strange feeling, being prepared at.

Thirty minutes buys you the things on this list, which are all small, practical and reusable. It does not buy you enough invested effort to start defending a plan. From where I sit, that is exactly the right amount.

The short version

Write down last time. Give everyone one thing. Three beats. Twenty names and one rule. Numbers on a page. One object and one ending.

That is the whole list, and most of it only has to be done once. If you have been putting off running a game because the preparation sounds like a second job, I would gently suggest it is not one.

If you want the longer version of what players notice, I wrote about that in what players wish their GM had prepared. The free printables cover the recap, the names and the handout in one page each.